Uganda-Rwanda Trip: Day 13

Gav is having some internet struggles; so, the accompanying pictures will arrive shortly.
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Wow. Major apologies for the delay, but things have been very busy (in a good way) and access to the net has been not so great.

We woke up fairly early, not really knowing what to expect of the day.

We were feeling pretty overwhelmed with all that we had seen up to then, and we had a slight sense of uncertainty about our future in Rwanda: There is still so much turmoil and need within the country.

We briefly wondered how we could really make an impact. I say briefly, because that lasted about 2 hrs.

Earlier that week, upon recommendation from Kirk Friedrich at Grassroots Soccer, we had placed a call to a group called Esperance that uses football for many social activities, such as gender equality promotion, HIV-AIDS awareness, and peace and reconciliation.

On the phone, we spoke with a very nice person who spoke barely any English, and we had to have our hotel concierge speak with him. After hanging up the phone, the concierge said that we had a meeting a 10:00am on Friday at the office of Les Jeunes and started to laugh.

We didn’t really have much of an idea of what that could mean.

When Friday morning came, we arrived at a small complex, complete with fields (first picture) and a few office buildings in the middle of one of the slums. We were greeted by a German named Dominique, and we were invited into a small office where we met the two people behind Esperance: Donatien and Victor.

These guys were great, and we soon hit it off talking about what they do and how they do it.

The list of what they do is endless, but we saw videos of their programs in action, and we were particularly impressed with their dedication to gender equality, ensuring to always include around 50% females in all of their football activities (this is very rare in Rwanda).

After an hour-long meeting, we finished by agreeing to do everything in our power to support their work and to develop a working partnership that will help both OA and Esperance continue to further our mandates of using football to improve the lives of the youth – super exciting stuff.

On our way back to our guesthouse, we saw some kids on the street playing football with a ball made out of plastic bags and old banana leaves.

We stopped to watch for a bit before deciding that one of the balls that we had brought on our trip should go to them. These kids were playing barefoot and with such passion, but their ball really didn’t allow much action.

As soon as we brought the ball out, they all stopped what they were doing and crossed the street to stand right next to us. We didn’t really know what to do, so we asked our trusty concierge to talk to them (as they didn’t speak any English).

A brief discussion later and we agreed, with the kids, that they could use the ball whenever they wanted, but that it was to be stored at the front desk of our guesthouse.

These kids were so happy… pretty funny that it takes so little from us to make them so happy.

After that, since it was Friday, we decided to head west to the Lake Kivu district for the weekend. With the week of remembrance still going on, we had no hope of doing much OA-related in Kigali, and so we took the opportunity to go see some of the rest of the country.

The next post will briefly describe what we saw in Kibuye and describe the very busy Monday that we had following a quiet weekend.